Jennifer Jones (born Phylis Lee Isley; March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009), also known as Jennifer Jones Simon, was an American actress and mental-health advocate. Over the course of her career that spanned more than five decades, she was nominated for the Oscar five times, including one win for Best Actress, and a Golden Globe Award win for Best Actress in a Drama.
A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones worked as a model in her youth before transitioning to acting, appearing in two serial films in 1939. Her third role was a lead part as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), which earned her the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress. She went on to star in several films that garnered her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the mid-1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946).
In 1949, Jones married film producer David O. Selznick and appeared as the eponymous Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 adaptation. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including Ruby Gentry (1952), John Huston’s adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953) and Vittorio De Sica’s drama Terminal Station (1953). Jones earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance as a Eurasian doctor in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955).
After Selznick’s death in 1965, Jones married industrialist Norton Simon and entered semiretirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974).
Jones suffered from mental-health problems during her life. After her daughter took her own life in 1976, Jones became deeply involved in the cause of mental-health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living the last six years of her life in Malibu, California, where she died of natural causes in 2009 at the age of 90.
